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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

You mean custom ones, right? WebViews are incredibly useful, but it definitely seems like implementing your own browser gives people a false sense of security, like they've been sandboxed when they haven't.

What would be nice here is a permission requirement if you're injecting code into a browser view.

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webviews for clicking arbitrary links in apps like instagram or gmail are absurdly restrictive. i lose my context, cookies, and regular tools (bookmarks are gone, sharing often overridden, etc)

This is why https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/sfs... exists and why the blog post advocates for using it.

That was a great update, but still not a true browser. No tabs, no bookmarks. Why should the website be restricted to one tab? Just open Safari and be done with it.

exactly

If you want a true browser there's always the option to move the current page from the in-app Safari View to the full browser.

In many cases I'd like to stay within the app. Those in-app Safari Webviews allows that. And if it is a website I'd like to browse in my usual, more permanent browsing evironment I always have th eoption to do so.

This two step approach is more useful to me than always opening links in the browser.

They're supposed to be restrictive as to not confuse the user. An in-app browser isn't there to give you a full browsing experience, it's there to do a quick web-only task that somehow cannot be done in the native app itself.

since years ago apple added the little back button to return you to your previous app, even webview is dead weight. apple should only allow one, in some special context, that's so counterintuitive to implement that only frameworks e.g. react native can justify the effort

And yet, we're normally seeing Apple === BAD because they limit everything to just the one Apple thing. Am I actually seeing requests for Apple to limit willingly?

Most of Hackernews doesn't understand why Apple is the #1 tech company in the world -- they're still in the "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" mindset.

in 2015 i got an iphone for a job, then i made it my daily driver because i liked the restrictions. now my phones last four years instead of one

How is the walled garden allowing a phone to last for four years? Where you getting new phones because you polluted your non-walled garden device with so many bad apps that you chose to get a new device? Not really following your point, but maybe I am?

i was getting new phones mostly because my devices were getting bogged down by android updates and capabilities. the os allowed developers to do more and more things, and offered more and more customization, faster than the pace of hardware improvements supported, to the point i'd have to get a new phone if i wanted something both up-to-date and fast. if i kept a phone longer much longer than a year, i'd have to worry about software updates as well, OR replace the OS and deal with instability.

and i'm not talking about bad phones here — htc one s, nexus 4, nexus 5, nexus 5x. admittedly, degradation of shitty NAND is still a factor in higher-end android phones, so it's not all about the android ecosystem being a free-for-all

an iphone xr will still run everything fine, including the latest version of ios. hundreds of dollars saved and a whole set of problems avoided over the life of the phone. i only replace my phones when they're smashed to bits now

anecdote: someone in my family just had to replace their android phone because a software update caused the radio to stop working for calls. so the ecosystem issue is not just a userland thing

I'm on an iPhone 6s+, so yeah, I'm a fan of the not needing a new phone all the time. I am pleasantly surprised with each new iOS that my phone is still not deprecated. At that point, I will have to look at updating.

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